Fragments of Noir

Saturday, 11 April 2026

Dust on the Hood

He had three whole dollars

A worn out car

And a wife who was

Leaving for good

Life's made of trouble

Worry pain and struggle

She wrote goodbye in

The dust on the hood

How's It Gonna End

(Waits/Brennan)

Tom Waits

image
John Vachon

Friday, 10 April 2026

Turning My Back #18

Vertigo

Ace in the Hole

Barton Fink

5 Against the House

Blood Simple

Ashes and Diamonds

Marlowe (2022)

Odd Man Out

Il Grido

Straight Time

Phantom Lady

Wages of Fear

Casino

High Sierra

Niagara

Narrow Margin

The Conversation

The Set Up

Body Heat

Sweet Smell of Success

Angel Heart

He looked at the drunk's back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in, down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself, and spoke to the bar kid.

Raymond Chandler
Red Wind
1938

Thursday, 9 April 2026

Just Behind Me

Sometimes, when i walk along the corridor, i fancy i hear her just behind me, that quick, light step. I couldn't mistake it anywhere, not only in this room, but in all the rooms in the house.

Mrs Danvers -
Rebecca
Hitchcock
1940

Fat City

It's where guys with flasks in their pockets line up on street corners at 4am to ride rattletrap buses into agricultural fields to pick tomatoes or top onions. Downtown is rife with greasy diners, fleabag hotels and steamy dive bars. Drunks take cover from the rain in incinerator silos. Boxers bust each other's noses in basement gyms. Dissolute men pine for wives who have ditched them, and dissolute women carp at no-good boyfriends. It's not pretty, yet somehow, through the honesty of it's grime and the earnest way it's inhabitants try to scrape and spar their way out of it, it becomes beautiful. "Fat City" is an Edward Hopper painting, a Robert Frank photograph, a midnight-choir Tom Waits operetta plunked on an out-of-tune piano.

excerpt from
Finding 'Fat City' with the Man Who Wrote It
Karen Schoemer
New York Times
2017

image
Jason Henry NYT
Leonard Gardner, Stockton 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/travel/leonard-gardner-stockton-california-finding-fat-city-novel.html